


Take the House

by scioscribe



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Extra Treat, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 17:45:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15935267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Nadine plays a long game and gets a last-minute partner.





	Take the House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



> References to off-screen domestic violence + Flagg being Flagg.
> 
> Dayna's "queen of air and darkness" reference could be from a lot of things, technically, but I'm thinking T. H. White, because why not give the _Lord of the Rings_ references _The Once and Future King_ for company?

There had been the night in college with the Ouija board

( _HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE)_

and you could, if you wanted, call that their first date.  Nadine had been wearing a little touch of perfume on the insides of her wrists that night: by her modest standards, that qualified as being all spruced up.  She teased the idea apart, notion by notion, on all those nights when fear kept her awake.  Whoever had reached out to her was old-fashioned; he had demanded a sepulchral purity.  Nadine had never known a man— _in the Biblical sense_ , the planchette seemed to trace against the blank whiteness of her ceiling—but she had known of them.  Girls talked.  The girls she lived with no longer talked to _her_ much, true, but she had heard enough.  The way they talked, men were limited creatures, stunted and Cro-Magnon and messy; they were both not worth talking about and the only thing worth talking about.

The subject they obsessively returned to was Bad Men.  Not leather-jacketed James Deans and Rhett Butler scoundrels but Ed Kemper and Ted Bundy (who was _cute_ , they said, you never could tell) and Jeffrey MacDonald.  The later the night wound on, the closer the stories would move to home, the more they would grow sadly mundane.  A sister’s husband who had slapped her for leaving his eggs to burn while she tried to get the baby to stop crying.  A father who—well, there were too many fathers to count.  Their fathers.  Other people’s fathers.

They talked about how to protect themselves from Bad Men.  Look at how he treats his mother.  Look at how he treats waitresses.

Nadine did not have a high opinion of how her distant demon lover would treat waitresses.  And somehow she didn’t think he had a mother.

That was crazy, but it was no crazier than anything else.

_NADINE IS DEAD WITH THEM NADINE IS ROTTEN WITH THEM UNLESS UNLESS_

Unless what?

This was not a man she could outfight with a pair of car keys stuck through her fingers; not a man she could outwit by seeing whether or not he stiffed someone on a tip.  She couldn’t avoid him.  He had already found her.

The story she needed to think of was the story of the sister who had burned the eggs.  She had picked herself up off the floor, washed the char out of the pan, and fried up four more, sizzling in butter, perfectly speckled with salt and pepper.  She had played the part he had written for her.  She had lived long enough to slip off one day and never, ever come back.

Nadine bought a planchette.  Not a cardboard-and-plastic Ouija set from the five-and-ten but a wooden one from an antique shop.  The way you would wear nicer shoes on a second date, carry a nicer purse, if the man had impressed you.  She wore the same perfume.  She settled her fingertips with their freshly painted nails lightly against the planchette.  This time she was alone.

“Just the two of us,” Nadine said.  She fought to keep her voice steady, though it felt like she could feel a million pinpricks of sweat standing out on her, sweat and gooseflesh at the same time, the hot-cold of terror and adrenaline.  “I thought that would be better.  Do you like that?”

The planchette skidded.  The handwriting was familiar.

_MY CLEVER NADINE_

_DID YOU BURN THE EGGS NADINE DID YOU_

She felt a dull pain in her stomach, as if the words had hit her like a fist.  He knew.  So there was no chance at all, then.

_I CAME UPON THAT LITTLE RUNAWAY WITH THE GREASE UNDER HER FINGERNAILS WITH THE FAINT SWEET RABBITY SMILE_

_I FOUND HER NADINE YOUR INTEREST IN HER A HALO ROUND HER HEAD_

“What did you do to her?” Nadine whispered.

The answer was decisive.

_WHO GIVES A SWEET SHIT_

_YOU DON'T NOT YOU NOT MY NADINE WHAT WILL I DO WITH YOU IS ALL YOU WANT TO KNOW_

“And?”

 _KA IS A WHEEL_ , he said, which she could not understand.  But then there was a strange hesitation, the planchette straining in one direction, the graphite of the pencil bending in an arc that said it would soon break, break and put an end to things, but then—then, in a series of bold, sudden swoops:

_I HAVE NEVER HAD A NADINE_

“Well,” Nadine said—this time she couldn’t stop her voice from shaking, couldn’t stop the squeak that came from her throat being closed up so tight, “you have me now.”

The only hope left in her was as small as a grain of sand.  She was something that he wanted, and he didn’t know yet what he would do when he had her.

And there was this—he had been right about what she was thinking but wrong, just a fraction wrong, a nerve ending off, about what she was feeling.  She did care what had happened to the woman who had burned the eggs.  The woman who had taken her baby and run.  She wanted to know what had happened… and what had happened to the child, whose name she still remembered.  Joe.

And the demon lover’s gaze had not pierced her that deeply.  He didn’t have all of her.

But she could smile at him as though he did.  She lifted one hand off the planchette and held it out, not the way you would shake hands with someone but the way you would offer your hand to be kissed, if you had a ring.  If the man who loved you wanted to do right by you.  His lips, when they touched her, were like frostbite.

_HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE_

_HOW I LOVE TO LOVE MY QUEEN_

That same frost crowned her: a ring of ice, its edges sharp.

After that, they no longer needed the planchette or the Ouija board to talk.  Married couples often had ways of speaking silently to one another.

*

Dayna had been in Vegas three weeks now and she still didn’t know what the hell was going on with Flagg’s right-hand woman.  Lloyd wore a clipping of her hair, braided black-and-white, around his ring finger, the way a knight would wear a favor from his queen, and for a while Dayna had thought that meant he was sweet on her, but it hadn’t taken long to figure out that Lloyd didn’t look at Nadine Cross as anything like a regular woman.  He thought she was made of alabaster and ice.  He thought his hand would fall off if he touched her.

Lloyd wasn’t all that bright, even with Flagg’s stone around his neck, Flagg’s gaze hot against his heart.  Dayna knew Nadine was flesh and blood.  She had a little bit of a New England accent—she’d trained some of it out, but her ‘r’ sounds all still came out as woolen and fluffy as if they’d been in sweaters, their sharpness not entirely gone but pretty damn well-padded.  She was from somewhere.  She’d had a life.

Dayna had cozied up to Lloyd because it was pretty damn easy to cozy up to Lloyd—Lloyd was like a dog looking for a scratch behind the ears.  But if Lloyd was a dog, Lloyd already had a master and the collar to prove it.  Good luck getting him to turn on the dark man, good luck getting him to bite the hand that fed.  Lloyd might like getting off, but he was never going to choose Dayna over Flagg.  She squeezed him for info and he leaked like a sponge—he trusted her—but as the days went on, she was starting to think info wouldn’t save them.

The superflu had been nothing but information once.  Knowledge safely locked up in vials.  Now look what had happened.  Effective, yeah, but it had taken too long, and no one had had their hand on the wheel.

 _I’m an okay spy_ , Dayna thought, _but I could be a better assassin.  If I got the right chance._

Lloyd was close to Flagg, but Lloyd would never turn on him.

Nadine was even closer.  Did that ribbon she wore around her neck count as a collar?  Dayna didn't know her well enough to guess.

As discreetly as she could, she asked around.  It wasn’t too hard.  Queen Nadine was a celebrity in their little Vegas commune, after all.

“She came here with Larry,” Jenny Engstrom said.

“Who’s Larry?”

“Larry Underwood.  You know, the ‘Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?’ guy.”  She rotated her bracelet around and around her wrist, looking at it instead of at Dayna.  “The rock star, if you can be a rock star when you only have the one song people actually know.”

Dayna didn’t ask where he was, why she hadn’t met him.  In Vegas, if somebody used to be there and then wasn’t there anymore, there was only one reason for that.

But Jenny must have read that silence pretty well, because she shook her head.  “He’s alive.  _He_ gave Larry to her as a wedding present.  Larry and the kid.”  She lowered her voice.  “Be glad you weren’t around for that wedding, I mean, Jesus Christ, your skin would crawl right off your bones.  See, he can’t screw her.  Or he can, but he’s holding off, because apparently hopping on that dick is a one-way trip to the loony bin.  Big surprise.  And he _likes_ her.”

And, Dayna thought, he probably liked having Nadine on a string, always coolly impressive, always exactly what he wanted, always knowing that if she slipped up…

“So Larry and the kid were supposed to be substitutes.  She’d have Larry to fuck her and she could raise the kid.  But Nadine let them go.”

Dayna got confirmation of the story from Lloyd, in bed, under the guise of teasing, asking him if it was true that Flagg liked to watch.  Lloyd didn’t think it was funny—no shit—but he answered anyway.

“Yeah, that’d be real fucking fun for me, sure.  Flagg was going to castrate that guy.  Snip-snip, sugar.  You really think Flagg would let another guy stick his cock in Nadine?  Fat chance.  But she turned them loose—said he was the only man for her and she didn’t need a kid anyway.  She says she’s going to go to him when he wants to have her, anytime he snaps his fingers, and then they’ll have _their_ kid.  Accept no substitutes.”  He skimmed his fingers down her side, curved them around her hip.  One of the only moves he had, so to speak, one of the only things he did that she liked.  “They probably died out in the desert.”

Probably.  Maybe.  But not definitely.  Not definitely by a long shot, and Lloyd knew that, too.

Not as definitely as crooner-boy would have been singing soprano.  Not as definitely as it would be trouble to leave a kid in Randall Flagg’s keeping.

Queen Nadine had taken a chance.  No small risk, turning down one of Flagg’s offers, spinning it into something better.  No wonder Lloyd looked at her like he’d lick mud off her shoes if she wanted.

Dayna had told Susan she would put her knife in Flagg if she got the chance, but she was never going to get the chance.  Flagg barely knew who she was, and fuck, she didn’t want him to know more than that.  Who knew what he would see if he really looked?

But there were things people didn’t look at.  Things they were used to.  Things that looked normal.

Purloined letters.  Wives.

Dayna felt the weight of her knife on the inside of her wrist.  Spring-loaded weapons were secrets, crouched and coiled, waiting for their chance.  Waiting wasn’t Dayna’s strong suit, never had been.  She liked to do a thing and get it done.

And she liked to do it herself but shit, you couldn’t have everything.

She was going to have to take a risk.  Trust that she knew a spring when she saw one, trust that all that spring needed was a blade and a good moment.

Dayna was going to have to adopt Lloyd’s courtly love bullshit; she was going to have to offer her sword to her queen.

*

Nadine was made of glass, glass as thin as a soap bubble, glass that could be broken with the touch of a finger.  With the wrong word or the wrong thought.  Yet she couldn’t afford to stop thinking—she had to think constantly and had to learn to think without so much as a twitch of her eyes or a dropped word in conversation.  Everything had to be calculated.  How she smiled, how she laughed, what she spoke of, what she ate at dinner.

Flagg had watched her like a hawk after their blasphemous little wedding, after she had sent Larry and Joe away.

He had tied a velvet ribbon around her throat that night.  Dark blue.

“Do you know the story about the little lady who always wore the ribbon around her neck?” he had said.  “It’s a story whispered to boys to tell them to beware of the wrong girls.”

Nadine smiled.  The right lipstick and even the stiffest smile had a little softness to it.  God bless America, Larry would have said, if Larry were still around, and right then she wished he was, right then she would have sold Larry piece-by-piece to the dark man if it would have saved her from this, from the silken drawl of his voice, from his hands on her skin.  His soft caress and the scratch of his long fingernails, his coke-sniffing nail, against her carotid artery.

She tilted her head back, letting him see her smile, smiling up into his face as though she wanted this, wanted any of this.

He smiled back.  His teeth were a little narrower than usual, a little longer.  He knew he terrified her.  He said, sometimes, that he could smell it on her, that she stank of fear.

_All across the miles, all across the years, sweet Nadine, I could smell your terror and your sweet, wet cunt._

Flagg held the ribbon tight against her, making it a little hard to breathe.  “Her lover boy asked her why she never took it off, but she just smiled, smiled, smiled—because she didn’t know what it was safe to say.  And lover boy took the ribbon off… and off with her head!”  He giggled.  “You don’t want your head to come right off your shoulders, do you, Nadine?”

“I won’t worry my pretty little head,” she whispered.

And he had pressed one of those cold, dry kisses against her mouth.  “But leave the ribbon on, sweet.  All the time.  Just as a little reminder.”

He didn’t mind her being frightened.  He _wanted_ her frightened, he _wanted_ her only asking what she needed to do to survive him.  He just wanted her to have no plans beyond that, no wants beyond that.

She was close to becoming what he wanted.  His figurehead queen.  His doll who moved just enough of her own accord to keep herself interesting, to remind him that there was a reason he was, at least for now, leaving her brain in her head.

And she was just getting so exhausted—the glass of her so close to cracking.  The secret that was her having a heart at all was dwindling in importance because each day it was less and less true, each day she wanted more and more to say fuck it, fuck her, fuck everyone, all these people looking at her with fear and wonder and sick-gratitude—all these people who came to him willingly!  They hadn’t been promised!  They hadn’t been followed their whole lives!  They had fucking walked to him step by step.  They had sworn their loyalty with tongues that hadn’t ever felt _his_.  What did they deserve of her?  What did the world deserve?  What had it ever done for her except give her no way out but what little, pathetic thing she could manage?

But there had been Joe.  Joe with his savagery and dirty face, Joe who had tried to kill anyone he thought would hurt her, who would have swung on Flagg himself if Larry hadn’t stopped him.

And there had been Larry, who had said, “I don’t think we want to go there, Nadine,” when she’d told him their destination, and who had argued with her every night about it but helped her there safely nonetheless, without so much as a kiss, without even very many kind words.  Larry who wanted to be good.

She hoped he and Joe had made it away.  She hoped they wouldn’t be the centerpiece of some future banquet, hogtied on the table like a bouquet of flowers, a reminder that when she was given a gift, she should accept it.  No matter what a cutie she was, Flagg had told her; so sweet to see a wife so devoted to her hubby.

He knew she feared him.  He chose to believe she halfway loved him—on the worst nights, she almost did, she almost felt her body throb like a toothache when he was around, her desire awful and rotten inside her.  He was still, someday soon, going to want that heir.  He was going to lose his temper.  She would burn the eggs and not be able to pick herself up off the floor again.

And then—

“Excuse me,” a voice said.  A woman’s voice.

Nadine had barely known where she was.  One of those indoor gardens.  Someone—Jenny Engstrom?—had told her there used to be a panda in there, though God only knew what had happened to it.

This wasn’t Jenny.  This was Lloyd’s little piece, Dayna Something.

Nadine didn’t know what to make of Lloyd, who was Flagg’s boy all the way down to the soles of his boots but who sometimes looked like he would rather be something else, if only he could.  He would take a bullet for her, she knew that, and that was unfortunate, because she was the person most likely to pull the trigger and she didn’t want to be thwarted, not when she’d finally made up her mind.

“Dayna,” Nadine said.  She smoothed her skirt to the side to let the woman sit down.

She was cute—slim, tightly-muscled, her hair a streaky, tawny dark blonde.  She was wearing shorts, cut-offs, and when she sat, the soft whitish fringed edges rode up high, hugging her strong golden thighs.  This didn’t feel like a toothache.  But it felt like feeling creeping back into skin that had been cold for too long—better not to feel anything at all.

They just sat there, looking at what was left of the flowers.  Most of them were dead.  Whitney came in sometimes and watered them, but sporadically, without remembering when he had last done it and without remembering which patches he’d gotten to and which he hadn’t.  A blotchy set of blooms.

Nothing like witty repartee.  Well, no one came to Vegas for the company, did they?

Nadine stood and then Dayna said, urgently, “Wait.”

It was the only time since she’d been here that Nadine had heard someone sound intense without also sounding afraid.  Anyone but him, and Dayna didn’t sound like him.  She stilled.

Dayna was taking something off her wrist.  Not a watch, because she seemed to be gathering it out of her sleeve like a magician’s scarf, and—

It was a knife.  Small, but sharp.  Dayna showed her what to do with it, how to make it jump into her hand.

“Really useful,” Dayna said, in her calm, polished steel voice.  “You know.  For self-defense.  Would you like it?”

 _I won’t worry my pretty little head_ , she’d told him.

She was going to say no.  She was going to say no because it was too much of a risk, because he could see everything if he looked the right way, he could see this talk, he could see the way her eyes lingered on Dayna’s biceps, he could see the hope.  He could smell it on her.

But, God, was she really that much of a coward?

He already had the worst things planned for her.  All she could control, of what he did to her, was whether he did it early or late.  Did she want to lose her will without having ever used it?  Did she want to wait for him to sniff out Dayna, wait for him to turn on Lloyd, wait for him to host another standing-room-only crucifixion?  Survival didn't mean dying last, it meant dying as who she wanted to be.  Not his bride--his selfish, practical, scared bride--but someone who cared, at least a little, about a fate that wasn't her own.  About a whole city of people who looked at her like she hung the moon.

Before she could stop herself, she took the knife and strapped it to her arm.  “For self-defense,” she said, and Dayna’s smile was so much more real than her own had been in years now.  Nadine would like to feel that happy about something before she died.  If she could spill even a drop of his blood, it would be worth it.

They said women bled, their first times.  At least this way she wouldn’t bleed alone.

Dayna put her fingertips to her lips, just briefly, and then rested her hand on the bench, a hairsbreadth from Nadine's.  Nadine could feel her warmth.

*

Dayna was the first one to see Nadine.  Afterwards.

She was wandering the halls.  From a distance, you’d think her dress was red; it was only up close that you started to know better.  But her face was as blank as the moon.  M-O-O-N, that spelled catatonic.  That spelled consummation.

_What did I do?  What did I do to her?_

But then Nadine registered her down the length of the hall.  Queen Nadine the untouchable, the unflappable, the pristine, the queen of air and darkness, all shall love her and despair.  Dressed in blood, more like Bluebeard’s wife than any Cinderella.  When she saw Dayna, she broke: she became messy flesh and blood, sobbing, white-faced, smiling a wild wolfish smile that showed all her teeth.  Nadine ran down the length of the hall and threw her arms around her, pressed her mouth tight against Dayna’s.

She tasted like copper.  The velvet ribbon had fallen from her neck.

Downstairs in the casino, someone had hit all sevens: Dayna could hear the chimes.  Good day to gamble.  She kissed Nadine back.


End file.
